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Lecture

Howard Epstein
Szilard: The Father of the Manhattan Project

Tuesday 29.08.2023

Summary

The father of the atom bomb meets the father of the Manhattan Project. Robert J Oppenheimer was appointed in January 1942 to head up the Manhattan Project - but who created the opportunity? This is the story of Leo Szilard, the man who enabled President Roosevelt to decide to build the atom bomb. The chances of its being deployed in time to forestall the invasion of the Japanese home islands were vanishingly small without Leo Szilard.

Howard Epstein

an image of Howard Epstein

Howard’s career as a solicitor spans more than five decades. He is a seasoned commercial lawyer and litigator, and has also written a biography (of Chaim Weizmann), a novel (a psychological thriller), a historical novel (about Sputnik and the space race) and a 350 page work of non-fiction, Traumatised Nation: How America Got To Be So Violent. He is presently writing “No Genius: Hitler’s Fatal Errors”.

Howard’s many articles on Israeli issues have been published in Manchester’s Jewish Telegraph newspaper and on israelseen.com, where scores of them, having gone viral weekly in the USA, remain on the website as a readily-available resource.

I’m also fearful of that, Monte Golden.

I’d like to see it with subtitles. I couldn’t understand much of what they said. It was a magnificent script, what I heard of it. I think they owed more to Szilard than was admitted, but it was a great piece of work, yes. A lot better than “Dunkirk.”